In various applications, recording media, such as "hard" disks or MO disks, are used to store a relatively large, finite amount of data. Often, the total capacity of such recording media is known in terms of the total amount of data available per medium. The total storage is then the product of this amount and the total number of media.
In many applications, it is inconvenient to express total available storage in this manner. For example, in applications relating to the storage of video or audio data, it is much more convenient to express available storage in terms of the available recording time which is a function of the recording rate, the disk capacity, and the total number of disks. That is, it is more convenient to express the total available storage in as the product of the recording rate, the capacity per disk and the total number of disks.
In relatively simple applications in which the recording rate and the total amount of recording space is substantially fixed, expressing available storage in terms of recording time is relatively straightforward. However, in more complicated systems, such as those utilizing a video editing workstation, several different recording rates, disk capacities and total number of disks are available. For example, a particular workstation may have the capability of processing several different video formats which utilize different data rates, such as double speed CDROM, HDTV SDI, or OC-12. Moreover, the video system might be used in conjunction with different types of storage media having different capacities. Further, the number of such media might vary. With such systems, it becomes burdensome for the operator to calculate available storage for different formats and/or different combinations of storage media.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need to provide a more convenient method and apparatus to calculate available storage for a data storage system based on the file size, number of disks and total storage of disks. In particular, there is a need to provide a manually operable calculator to more readily determine available storage.